While the sample size only represents 4% of books ever published, and the approach is often limited by the complexity of language usage, the project offers a fascinating (not to mention fun!) look not just into language, but into comparative cultural trends, historical events, fads, celebrity, and influence.

And best of all, Google has provided a free web-based interface so that anyone can play around with Ngram searches.

For instance, the Ngram Viewer can be used to compare the usage of the terms Mormon vs LDS:

When I first became aware of the tool on Friday, one of the first things I thought of was what the angel Moroni said about the prophet Joseph Smith’s name when he first appeared to the prophet:

“He called me by name, and said unto me that he was a messenger sent from the presence of God to me, and that his name was Moroni; that God had a work for me to do; and that my name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people.”

I also remembered the first verse of the revelation contained in section 122 of the book of Doctrine and Covenants where the Lord declares of Joseph Smith:

“The ends of the earth shall inquire after thy name, and fools shall have thee in derision, and hell shall rage against thee;”

Joseph Smith was born on December 23, 1805; 205 years go this week. I thought it would be interesting to see what the Ngram Viewer could show concerning these prophecies about the prophet’s name compared to some other comparable religious and spiritual figures, as well as a few other influential or famous thinkers and historical characters.

After playing around with various names, I settled on the following names to compare to Joseph Smith:

• Abraham Lincoln – The 16th President of the United States
• Charles Darwin – the father of the Theory of Evolution
• Karl Marx – considered the Father of Communism
• Sigmund Freud – the father of modern Psychotherapy
• Ann Lee –  the founder of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, also called the Shaking Quakers or Shakers, in the U. S. in the 1770s.  Doctrine & Covenants Section 49 is directed at the Shakers.
• Emanuel Swedenborg – a well known Christian mystic in the late 1700s whose visions and theology have sometimes been compared to Joseph Smith.  His disciples included the father of Henry and William James. He also influenced Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Butler Yeats, Johnny Appleseed, Carl Jung, Helen Keller, and other well known figures.
• Mary Baker Eddy – the founder of Christian Science in the late 1800s
• Ellen White – visionary founder of the Seventh Day Adventists in the late 1800s
• Charles Russell –  the founder of the Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society in the late 1800s, which later became the Jehovah’s Witnesses
• Adolf Hitler – Infamous leader of the  National Socialist German Workers Party
• Emily Dickinson – the reclusive American poet

Here are the combined results for the search:

According to this measure, Abraham Lincoln clearly has produced the greatest and longest lasting discussion among this selection.  After many years of decline, he was briefly surpassed by Karl Marx after the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and a decade or so later Freud, who had been steadily increasing, was also comparable to Lincoln.  Thankfully, Lincoln began to regain ground in the 1980s and has continued to do so, while Marx simultaneously declined at about the same rate as Lincoln’s resurgence, and Freud has been in decline since about the mid-1990s.

(As an aside, it is interesting that the references to Karl Marx began a steady decline about a decade before the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the end of the cold war. I wonder what kinds of predictions we might try based on current trends?)

How does Joseph Smith fare by this measure?  Interestingly, he is most comparable to Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, and Adolf Hitler (after the 1950s).   If you are talking about names that  are “had for good and evil among all nations ” and names after which “the ends of the earth shall inquire,” being in the company of the names like Darwin, Dickinson, and Hitler is quite impressive. Especially contrasted with the other religious founders in this group.

Here are individual charts for Joseph Smith and each other individual:

Joseph Smith vs Abraham Lincoln

Joseph Smith vs Charles Darwin

Joseph Smith vs Karl Marx

Joseph Smith vs Sigmund Freud

Joseph Smith vs Ann Lee

Joseph Smith vs Emanuel Swedenborg

Joseph Smith vs Mary Baker Eddy

Joseph Smith vs Ellen White

Joseph Smith vs Charles Russell

Joseph Smith vs Adolf Hitler

Joseph Smith vs Emily Dickinson

In some ways it is hard to compare these names.  For instance, I am sure that there are numerous references to the prophet as “Joe Smith” or just “Smith” that are not found by searching for “Joseph Smith”.  There are also likely some Joseph Smiths that refer to individuals other than the prophet, but while a search for Joseph Smith Jr. would help exclude these, it would be too specific and miss all of the references to just Joseph Smith.  So I stuck with Joseph Smith.

I then applied a similar approach to the other names.  For instance, a search for “Hitler” or “Marx” would yield far more references than “Adolf Hitler” or “Karl Marx,” but because I can’t search for just “Smith” for Joseph Smith, I decided to only search for the highest yielding version of  each individual’s full name.  In some cases, like Charles Russell and Ellen White, that meant excluding middle names for the same reason that I excluded the Jr. for Joseph Smith, even though they may accidentally include others with the same name.  In the case of Mary Baker Eddy, however, including the middle name produced higher results than without, so I used that name.

This is hardly a comprehensive study.  It’s just a blog post based on my own messing around with the Ngram Viewer during a few hours.  The viewer has numerous options. You can select different collections of books and languages, and change the way it averages the data.  I ran all of my comparisons using the default English corpus and a smoothing of 3. Switching the smoothing option to 0, for instance, results in a chart of the raw data:

You can learn more about how the Ngram Viewer works and what its different options do here.  There are still innumerable applications to this topic as well as many, many others.

Go play with it.  Then share what kinds of cool things you have tried.

UPDATE 12/19/2010

My friend Brian Duffin pointed out another interesting thing. If you search the Ngrams for “Jesus” there is a huge spike in the frequency of references to Jesus that starts just before 1800 and climbs rapidly to its highest points between 1810 and 1815, and while it fluctuates, it remains high until around 1842, after which it declines quickly, resurges briefly during the Civil War, and then steadily declines until nearly 1980. Since then it has been rapidly climbing, though not quite as fast as it did in the first decade of 1800.

Jesus

Interestingly, the highest spike corresponds to the years just before Joseph Smith’s birth in 1805 until he was about 10 or 11 years old. This lends support to the prophet’s declaration that in about 1817 “there was in the place where we lived an unusual excitement on the subject of religion.”  Apparently there was an unusual excitement, not just in the region where he lived, but in the English Language in general. The frontier folk may have been behind the trend by a few years.

Also interesting, the excitement remains relatively high throughout the prophet’s life, getting nearly has high toward the end of his life as the beginning, and then begins its rapid decline almost exactly when Joseph Smith is murdered in 1844.

Thanks Brian!

Daniel Bartholomew and I are very excited to introduce you to ScriptureLog.

[We appear to be having some issues with our web host.  We hope to have it resolved soon.  If it doesn't load try it again after a while.]

ScriptureLog

Scripturelog is a free, open source plugin for the popular WordPress blogging platform that turns WordPress into a collaborative online LDS scripture study journal.

The plugin installs volumes of scripture into WordPress as hierarchical, inter-linking pages of books, chapters, and verses. Once the pages are installed, you can use the built-in features of WordPress by yourself or in collaboration with others to read the scriptures, take notes, and discuss the gospel.

ScriptureLog can be used by a family or a study group to read and comment on the scriptures from a distance. It can be used by a Sunday school, seminary, or school religion class to allow for preparatory or follow up discussion by class members on the scriptures being studied for a class. It can be set up on an local network for private use or hosted publicly.

Go check it out right now at http://scripturelog.com and then come back here.

Features
ScriptureLog benefits from all of the great features of WordPress. And there are scores of free plugins and themes that can be used to customize the site to your liking: plugins to make the site private, or to require registration; plugins to allow people to subscribe to be notified of comments by email; plugins to allow people to login using Facebook or Open ID; plugins to interface with twitter.

Currently only the Book of Mormon is available. It is organized in a way to help readers understand the textual structure of the book. Though not yet available for download, the code for the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price is substantially complete. However we are still working on an organization that helps illuminate some of the textual structure of these other books, like we have for The Book of Mormon, so we have not made them available quite yet.

Every ScriptureLog page links to the corresponding section at the official LDS Scriptures website.

Because it is open source and built on WordPress, the plugin is open to innovation by others. WordPress has a well documented plugin API and we hope that in addition to suggesting patches to the plugin itself, other developers will produce companion plugins to enhance features.

How ScriptureLog Came to Pass

I am not a very good at studying the scriptures. I have often had great aspirations for a better approach to scripture study, but my study nearly always falls far short of my intentions. I’ve experimented with various systems of study over the years, always looking for something better. In some ways, ScriptureLog is an extension of that search.

In September of 2004, ancient history in blogging, when I was still blogging under the pseudonym Ebenezer Orthodoxy, I wrote a post entitled “On the Follies of Scripture Marking.” While scripture marking has its place, my main concern was that it encourages a reductionist compartmentalization of the text and facilitates ritualized reading. In other words we establish visual queues that prompt us to read the verses the same way each time we encounter them and separate them from the surrounding text. I began to explore the idea of a scripture study journal as an alternative to scripture marking. (That post is no longer publicly available, but I may repost it if there is interest.)

In March of 2005, I posted about my attempts to construct a scripture study journal. I purchased a looseleaf edition of the Book of Mormon designed for use in a day planner from Deseret Book and put it in a small three-ring-binder style journal. I could write impressions, thoughts, observations, relationships to other scriptures, and note external references or personal experiences related to the text on the journal pages along with the date and then insert them in between the pages of the Book of Mormon to which they related. I still like this idea a lot, however the pages would rip out of the binder easily and it was too tedious to reinforce them manually, and I stopped using it.

In March of 2006 I registered a scripture related domain name and began working on my own scripture study service that would allow people to use emerging technology trends in tagging and folksonomy to tag scriptures and take notes. I wanted to have free signup, groups, tools for group administration and coordination, etc. But at the time the project was simply too ambitious for me to do in my spare time.

In April of 2007 I tried using Google’s Notebook product as an electronic scripture study journal. I would link to the section of scripture at scriptures.lds.org and write my notes. The notes were available anywhere I had internet access, but they were also outside of the context of the actual text and they were difficult to organize. I stopped using it.

Daniel Bartholomew and I met through LDS Blogging. He had various scripture study projects of his own, but since he is not a programmer he was doing a lot of manual work with HTML tables. We had discussed our mutual interest in ways to improve scripture study and my ambitions for a scripture study website back in 2006, and I had helped him a little with some of his coding projects.

At the end of 2007 he paid me to write a custom program for him that would parse text files containing scriptures and generate thousands of static HTML files based upon customizable templates.

But Dan felt the final result was still not entirely satisfying. He also wanted to ‘go’ open-source and create a model which would allow others to improve the results.

Dan and I were discussing some enhancements he wanted for the program I had written and ideas he had about where he would like to see his project go. Dan had been a big fan of WordPress ever since I had known him and decided WordPress provided an excellent model for what he wanted. He asked me how hard it would be to import the html scripture pages he had been working on into a WordPress MySql database and I told him it was very possible and had some immediate ideas about how to do it. At that point we both became very excited about the prospects. Dan wanted to pay me to work on it, but after looking into it I was so excited about his idea that I offered to do it for free. I realized that WordPress offered all of the things I had wanted to do with my own scripture study service: user management, tagging, RSS feeds, plugins, and developer API. Why not use WordPress as the platform? Dan’s idea was great!

I had seen myself as merely a technical advisor to Dan’s project, but Dan asked me to partner with him on this project and I accepted.

Working full time, finishing my degree at BYU, working on the scripture parser program, and developing and launching my LDS blog portal, NothingWavering.org, kept me from pursuing the WordPress idea until nearly a year later. On December 23, 2008 I emailed the first version of the plugin to Dan. It still needed a lot of work and with Dan’s continual feedback, ideas, and testing I continued to work on it into 2009.

In March of 2009, I posted an Outline of the Textual Structure of the Book of Mormon to my blog. The outline was an outgrowth of my work on the ScriptureLog Plugin.

So here we are in October, 2009 and it is finally launching.

President Ezra Taft Benson, in his famous sermon on the Book of Mormon said:

“The time is long overdue for a massive flooding of the earth with the Book of Mormon for the many reasons which the Lord has given. In this age of the electronic media and the mass distribution of the printed word, God will hold us accountable if we do not now move the Book of Mormon in a monumental way.”

ScriptureLog represents the culmination of our personal attempts to find ways to better study the scriptures, in particular the Book of Mormon, and we hope that it can contribute to the fulfillment of President Benson’s prophetic vision.

Dan and I enjoy working together and look forward to not only eventually making all the scriptures available for WordPress, but also to develop ways that we can apply this blog-and-a-book technology to other forms of great literature.

Just click the Facebook button in the comments section of any post and approve Sixteen Small Stones for use with your facebook account, and you will be able to leave a comment on any article whenever you are logged into Facebook.

First time comments will still be subject to moderation, but once your first comment has been approved, you should be able to comment at will.

Let me know what you think and if you have any trouble with it.

Unexpected changes at my employment, and in our family, prevented me from pursuing further feature developments as I had planned.  But things are finally moving along now.

With Nothing Wavering I always wanted to attempt more transparency and community feedback than is available at most other LDS blog portals.  Finally, I am pleased to announce the new Nothing Wavering Blog where you can keep up with new features and blogs being added to the portal, as well as give your feedback.  Please consider subscribing to the blog’s RSS Feed or Email List to to keep up with what is happening with the portal, since I will not be discussing it much here at Sixteen Small Stones.

New features already announced include the ability to follow Nothing Wavering content with Twitter, a new Nothing Wavering Facebook Group, and plans for a Nothing Wavering Podcast using technology that allows listeners to easily record their own questions, comments, and topic suggestions over the phone to be included in the next episode of the Podcast.

There is also now a Nothing Wavering banner image that blogs included on the portal, as well as anyone else who wants to, can add to their websites to help promote the site.

It should be a fun and interesting endeavor for 2009.  I will continue to blog here as well, but  to keep up with future developments, as well as participate in its direction, please join me over at the Nothing Wavering blog.

The map represents data gathered from the popular photo sharing website Flickr.com, which is owned by Yahoo!. Flickr allows users to upload their photos and make their albums public, so that the pictures may be viewed by anyone, or make them private, so that they may only be viewed by limited friends or family. The map shows the privacy settings for a sample of 1,000,000 users in 2005. Green spots show users who have chosen to make their photos public. Red spots represent users who have chosen to keep their photos private.

Arrington comments about what the map reveals:

The US is widely public except for users who seem to be hovering around Utah, and varies by state. Europe, by contrast, is largely private, and more so as you move north. The Middle East is wide open. South East Asia is mixed. India is private.
(emphasis added)

I would add that Arrington fails to notice that Hawaii is also more private though apparently not as much as Utah itself.

Of course, Utah has the highest concentration of Latter-day Saints in the U.S., so it is natural to wonder if their might be a correlation between the trend in Flickr privacy settings, and Mormonism or Mormon Culture?

Recently, Utah was rated as the most tech-savvy state in the nation, so perhaps the privacy simply reflects a better understanding of online security issues.

On the other hand, because the data is from 2005, it could mean the opposite—that Utah is slower than the rest of the nation in adopting the open, web 2.0 culture, and that more recent data would show less of a difference.

Another possibility is that the LDS concern for protecting their families from internet pornography causes them to have stricter control over Internet usage by minors, who would be the demographic more apt to share their photos publicly. Perhaps the LDS emphasis on Internet filtering has also increased awareness about internet predators, and so users are more cautious.

Politically, Utah is also one of the most conservative states in the Union, so maybe a tendency for paranoia about government conspiracies and privacy issues makes the people less likely to be open with their personal lives.

We could also speculate that Mormons already feel peculiar and expect criticism and scorn from others, and so they may feel less inclined to parade pictures of their unique beliefs and cultural quirks on the internet, where they could likely attract ridicule.

Perhaps there is some attribute of Utah culture that is shared by Hawaii, Europe, India, and Australia, that makes them more private. Or maybe they are all more private for different reasons.

It would be great to see a lot more data related to the subject. Perhaps Yahoo and other Web 2.0 companies will release additional, detailed studies about it. I hope so.

What do you think? Why would areas of the U.S. with high concentrations of Latter-day Saints be less inclined to share their photos with the public?

Official Audio Feed
Official Video Feed

During recent sessions of conference I have been linking to the Podcast available through KSL.com. The KSL podcast is great because the sessions become available very quickly, usually before the subsequent session has started. However, the feed from KSL is very poorly managed. This last conference it worked fine for the Saturday sessions, but none of the Sunday sessions ever were posted. It makes me wonder if the feed is being generated by hand and someone forgot to update it.

In any case, extrapolating from the naming of the mp3 files for Saturday sessions, I was able to guess the names of the Sunday session mp3 files, which did in fact exist shortly after each session, and link to them from my blog.

The advantage of the official feeds from lds.org is that they will likely be better maintained, and that they offer individual mp3s of each talk rather than semi-sessional mp3s like the KSL feed.

I wonder if the new official feeds will update as quickly as the KSL feed? It would be great if the mp3 for each talk posted shortly after the talk completed.

I was reading an interesting article on a usability design method they call “Paper Prototyping” and the first comment on the article was pure geek gold. In order to truly appreciate it let me give you the context first.

Paper Prototyping is a inexpensive, low-tech method of brainstorming, or of testing the usability of proposed designs for a software interface. Basically, you print out the various aspects of the proposed user interface on paper or cards. You cut out individual elements of the interface design with a pair of scissors if necessary. Then you sit down with the end user and you take the place of the computer. The user then interacts with the paper prototype, and you show them what would happen by laying down different sections to show how the interface changes and displays data.

So here is the golden comment by one Mantari Damacy:

It is like a role playing game, except, for using a computer!

PLAYER: “Okay, I save my file.”

GM: [dice clatters, looks up chart] Okay, you try to save your file, A new window pops up on the screen that indicates a general I/O error, but gives no specific details.

PLAYER: “Oh no! I open up the case, and pull the boot disc off of the IDE controller!”

GM: Okay. [dice clatters] Well, you manage to open up the case without tripping the power, but you’re not familiar with the internal workings of this machine. You can’t locate any IDE drives…

Awesome! I can just imagine a prototyping session ending with the following exchange between the designer and user:

“Sinus supremus!”
“Zero charisma!”
“Sinus supremus!”
“Zero charisma!”

See the original article

I will be posting my notes on the sessions I attend in a subsequent post when I get a moment. However, it may have to wait until after the Weird Al Yankovic concert at the State Fair tonight.

White and Nerdy

There are, of course, already a couple of popular portals for keeping up with blogging by LDS members, but there have sometimes been those who are dissatisfied with the blog selection. Some feel that too many apostate and borderline apostate blogs are included, while others don’t feel they are included enough.

Well now anyone can, with a very small amount of effort, create and host his or her own public or private LDS blog portal.

I am not really interested in maintaining my own LDS blog portal to compete with existing portals, even though the code upon which the most popular of these, ldsblogs.org, is available for free from its creator, Russ Johnston.

However, I do have an interest in new technology, and as a personal challenge, I wondered if I might be able to create a near clone of his portal, using only XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript in conjunction with the nifty new Google Ajax Feed API .

The resulting application is pretty cool, even if I do say so myself. It reproduces much of the functionality of the Mormon Archipelago portal, without any need for server side code, or complicated feed caching. And even better, it accomplishes it in about 38K of static XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript that runs entirely in the user’s browser and communicates to Google to fetch posts from the blogs it aggregates.

And because it requires no server side technology, it can be run from just about anywhere, even from a blogger blogspot.com site or even your own computer’s hard drive or desktop!

Check out the example running on blogspot at
http://lds-blogs.blogspot.com

Anyone is free to download the blog portal code and roll their own LDS Blog portal, add or remove feeds, and organize them how ever they wish.

The code can be downloaded in two flavors: a multi file version that splits out the code into 3 separate html, css, and javascript files, or the single file version that includes all of the code in a single html file that can be used as a blogger template.

Download Blog Portal Multi File version
Download Blog Portal Single File version

I have maintained the general feel, terminology, and blog groups used by ldsblogs.org because my personal challenge was to create an clone using only client-side technology and I thought it would be good for people to start with something familiar that they could then tweak. Modify it however you would like to include or exclude blogs, group them differently, or change the labels, how posts are displayed, or even the whole layout if you like. It is very flexible.

Of course, the code can be used to create not just an LDS blog portal, but any kind of blog portal; to aggregate and group posts from any number of websites that offer RSS Feeds and display them in groups on a single page.

Some technical details

The most difficult part of setting up the blog portal is getting your Google API Key for the website on which you intend to run the portal. You will need to have a Google Account. If you have a gmail account, you already have one. If not, you can sign up at http://www.google.com/accounts/ .

To generate the Google API Key for your website, go to
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxfeeds/signup.html . Login with your Google account if necessary, agree to the Terms of Use and enter the url of your website. Then click “Generate API Key”. Google will generate a key that will look like a long list of letters and numbers.

Open up the index.html file for the portal in a text editor like Notepad and find the following line (about line #17 in the multi file version, line #40 in the single file version):

var FeedAPIKey = ‘’;

Copy and paste the API Key that Google generated in between the single quotes. Like this:

var FeedAPIKey = ‘XBQIAAAAyWlSO6jLDRIPbjAOCuNWIBT2XXp_ZAY8_ufC3CFXhHIE1NLwkxSOzqSZjo9n2sRzVuv6OkmWTwCsAR’;

Then save the index.html file.

At this point, the portal should be fully functional, even if you open it in your browser from your own hard drive or desktop.

The feeds are grouped and displayed using a custom feedGroup JavaScript class that I wrote as a wrapper for the Google Ajax Feed API. If you want to add, remove, or move a feed from one group to another, simply find the line of JavaScript where it is added to the group in the html file and make the changes.

For instance, if you wanted to add the feed for the official lds.org website to the first group, you would find the lines where the first group is configured and add the following:

feedGroup1.addFeed(‘http://feeds.lds.org/ldsHomeFeatures’);

That is it. Now save the html file and reload it in your browser and the most recent posts to lds.org will appear mingled with other posts from sites in the first group.

The download includes as readme file with some additional details, and feel free to ask questions or give feedback here in the comments.

The idea is that that users interact with the computer through muti-touch surface displays where you can interact with objects by touching them.

To see what I mean, go and watch the video on the PopularMechanics website right now:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html

Very exciting stuff. Our kids will look back at our computers and scoff in disbelief at our clunky, nonintuitive, mouse-mediated computing.

Visit the official Microsoft Surface website to learn more about it.

There is already a thread about its possible applications in the church at the official LDS Tech forum.

The “user created content” aspect of web 2.0 has received a lot of attention among modern web companies. YouTube, Digg, and Blogs are all poster children of this new era. The first official public web forum of the LDS church is a great example of how the church is experimenting with tapping into that resource.

But because it is the Church of Jesus Christ, directed through priesthood authority and revelation and not a democratic worldly institution, the role of user generated content in the church’s official websites will always have limited application.

There is another part of web 2.0, however, that is equally important and can be leveraged by the church to a much greater extent: distributed content and viral marketing. There are many, many members of the church active on the web with blogs and personal websites. They represent a great opportunity for the church to leverage this web presence as a viral distribution channel for church produced content.

The new videos that are viewable on mormon.org are a good example. I think they are great. But they are only going to be seen by visitors to the mormon.org website. In other words, only those who have already been drawn to the website by other means will see them. However, if mormon.org would provide code next to them that viewers could copy and paste into their own blogs and webpages to embed the videos in their own websites, much like youtube and google videos can be, they suddenly become distributable. The church takes care of the bandwidth for the streaming video, but the videos are now available for viewing by visitors to a large number of personal websites of members—visitors who may never have come to mormon.org otherwise.

As they now stand, the videos can already be embedded into blogs and websites using the code below:

492×324
<object width="492" height="324"><param name="movie" value="http://www.mormon.org/Static%20Files/MormonOrg/Flash/vid_player.swf"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.mormon.org/Static%20Files/MormonOrg/Flash/vid_player.swf" flashvars="vidRef=http://www.mormon.org/media/Mormonorg/Tony_Parker_Long_Search_for_truth.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" quality="autohigh" width="492" height="324"></embed></object>

The first drawback of embedding the videos like this is that they provide no built in mechanism for directing viewers to mormon.org or sharing the videos with others. I could embed the video in the sidebar of my blog and provide a link back to the mormon.org website like this:

164×108
Code:
<div style="background-color: #30587d; font-size: small; text-align: center;"> <div><object width="164" height="108"><param name="movie" value="http://www.mormon.org/Static%20Files/MormonOrg/Flash/vid_player.swf"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.mormon.org/Static%20Files/MormonOrg/Flash/vid_player.swf" flashvars="vidRef=http://www.mormon.org/media/Mormonorg/Tony_Parker_Long_Search_for_truth.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" quality="autohigh" width="164" height="108"></embed></object></div> <p><a style="color: #ffffff;" href="http://www.mormon.org">Learn more at www.Mormon.org</a></div> <p>

Ideally, though, the videos themselves should have a built in mechanism for redirecting viewers back to the website to learn more or share the video with a friend, similar to embedded videos from YouTube. At the same time, including an html link in the embed code in addition to the flash would probably be a good idea so that embedded videos would be picked up by search engines with a link back to mormon.org.

The other big problem with embedding the videos as they currently work is that they play automatically on pageload. If they are embedded in a blog post or a website sidebar, the visitors to that webpage should have to click on them to play them, otherwise they could quickly become annoying.

Eventually, code might be provided that would randomly choose one of the available videos and embed it on a webpage so that each time the page is viewed a different video is available.

Of course, videos are just one kind of distributable content. Ultimately, I envision a new section of Mormon.org where people can go to get HTML and JavaScript snippets that can be simply copied and pasted into their blogs and websites that will display widgets of distributed content from the church ranging from video, to church press releases, to inspirational quotes from modern prophets, or randomly rotating excepts from the Book of Mormon and New Testament, all with links back to the mormon.org website where people can chat live with missionaries or share the content with their own friends and family via email or embedding it on their own websites.

By building this kind of distributed content portal, the Church will be able to display and update its content on thousands of websites each with their own audiences and each showing up in Google searches in which Mormon.org would never show up. Simulataneously, members of the church will have new, easy-to-use tools for sharing the gospel on the web.

What do you think? Would you embed mormon.org videos or other content on your blog or website?

They are also holding a free Tech Talk in Provo on Tuesday January 23rd for system engineers, software developers and testers, interaction designers, and other techies to discuss how the church uses technology to build the kingdom.

I plan to attend the tech talk. if any of you will be going, let me know and we can meet up.

However, my experience as a computer programmer has taught me a healthy distrust of technology and of people using technology.

Implementing proper security in any system takes an exceptional amount of effort, and even then, hackers are unbelievably resourceful and will often find ways to infiltrate the system despite a well implemented security process. What a lot of people unfamiliar with the topic don’t realize is that hackers excel at not only software engineering, but at what we call Social Engineering, or manipulating people using their expectations of technology.

Here is an illustrative example of the kind of technological-social engineering a hacker might use that I remember from a security book I read some years ago:

Many offices employ a phone system where the phones have a small caller-id display screen that, for internal calls, shows the name of the employee who is calling. Some of these systems have a weakness in that if you receive a call from outside the company and then forward it to another employee’s extension, it will display your name on the caller id of the other employee instead of showing it as an outside call. Taking advantage of this fact, a hacker calls the receptionist and asks to speak with the company president. When the company president answers the call, the hacker tells him that he has made a mistake and meant to be transferred to the IT department. The president, forwards the call on to the IT department. What does the IT staff member see in the caller-id? She sees the company president’s name. She picks up the phone and the hacker, doing his best imitation of the president’s voice, says “I seem to have forgotten my password. Will you please reset it to: hck@12a.” The IT staff member thinks it is the company president, tells him that she will get on it right away, hangs up the phone and makes the change. The hacker can now use the password to access the president’s account.

The hacker in this example used social engineering in combination with technical knowledge to compromise the company’s system.

I used to work as a data conversion programmer for a financial data center. While the data center’s security policy and procedure were well designed and employees did a good job of adhering to the policy, we struggled to get the employees of the banks we provided service for to understand security issues and act accordingly.

When new banks signed on to our system, I was in charge of migrating loan data from their old data source to our system. Usually the data was transferred by plane on large magnetic tapes. However, I was surprised at the number of times I received unencrypted email attachments from bankers consisting of an Excel spreadsheet of the loan data to be converted. The loan data did not contain PIN numbers, but it often contained sensitive information such as names, mother’s maiden names, social security numbers, what the loan was for, or information about how often the account holder had been late on their payment and by how long.

No matter how emphatically we stressed the insecurity of sending such data via email, the convenience of it, and the resistance to learning to use new, secure methods of transferring it, guaranteed that it would still happen.

Perhaps it is needless to mention that my sense of security with regard to my own financial data, and financial data in general has never recovered. It is a miracle that our society continues to function on its unquestioning faith in modern technology and those who use it. Chaos always lurks beneath the seemingly serene surface. I would not at all be surprised if one day it all came tumbling down.

So back to voting machines.

The Center of Information Technology at Princeton University has published a research paper demonstrating how to hack Diebold voting machines so that they steal votes for one candidate and give them to another, and then report the incorrect winner in the final tally.

From my memory, the machines appear to be identical to the ones I used in the primary election earlier this year and that will likely be used this fall in the general elections.

The research team has also produced the following 10 minute video demonstrating how the machines are compromised and the vote tallies changed. It is well worth the 10 minutes to watch it. You can view it embedded below or at the Princeton research website linked above.

This video should scare voters to death. With the general election fast approaching, I hope that Utah County and State will address this study and come up with a solution to assure voters that the election will not be compromised by the use of Diebold voting machines, even if that means going back to punchcard ballots.

Please write your city, county, and state representatives including the county commissioners and clerk/auditor.

UPDATE: Diebold Election Systems Inc. has released a statement intended to refute the Princton study. They explain that the security software on the model used in the study is old and is not in use in any of the states that employ the machine. The method used to compromise the antiquated system would not work on current versions. That doesn’t mean that we should not be concerned. But it does mean that Princeton Study was performed on an outdated system and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Still, my experience teaches that we should be worried about the potential for hacking electronic voting machines.

In order to help those interested, I’ve added an embedded Google Calendar to the blog sidebar on the right that displays upcoming events where I will be performing with my troupe.

It will also list other events that I will be attending but not performing at, or that I recommend, like the monthly English Country Dancing classes with the Regency Historical Society of Utah, that you might want to check out as well.

The events calendar also has a feed to which you can subscribe with a feed aggregation program or online service to keep informed of events I list.

For those of you who live outside of Utah but sometimes stop in to the state to visit friends or family, be sure to check out the events calendar before you come to see if you might be able to catch a puppet show or attend another recommended event while you are here.

If you subscribe, you will receive an email copy of any and all of the articles I publish here. The email will only be sent if there are new or updated articles. If I publish more than one article in a day, you will receive only one email containing all of the articles for that day.

This service is provided for free by feedburner.com .